Brave new world of social media

EDITOR'S NOTE: There are two important factors to take away from this article. One is to realize the importance of the consumer in your media plan - involve them by creating a network for them. Involve your advertiser by creating a social marketing media for them. Consider blending Mobile Broadcast with AdPix, or adding the new txtNpix. See our website for more details.

Social media is a “must” in your marketing plan. The 2010 Media Planning Intelligence Study recently released a report that shows nearly 58% of its respondents ideally plan to include social media in their plans for marketing next year.

Social media is still a developing marketing strategy, and many have been slow to jump on the bandwagon, simply because it has been previously difficult to understand.

Is social media a form of advertising? Oddly enough, the power of social media is, in some corners, being eschewed as something that’s not a form of advertising. Nevertheless, the study from Media Planning Intelligence suggests that not only do many companies consider social media to be a form of advertising, they also consider it to be an essential form of advertising, giving it priority over more traditional channels when they decide how to allocate their advertising budgets.

Though social media was bundled into a category with other “non-traditional” forms in the study, there is a definite trend toward “non-traditional” forms over “traditional” forms. “Non-traditional” includes such advertising strategies as online, mobile and other emerging media platforms, and “traditional” includes TV, radio, print, and out-of-home advertising. In the study, respondents planned to use “non-traditional” advertising over “traditional” advertising 57% to 43%.

So what’s sending everyone online? For one thing, those dwindling media budget dollars stretch a lot further in online media channels than they do in more traditional media advertising. A television spot is still far more expensive than getting an ad for the exact same show on a streaming service like Hulu, and a traditional newspaper ad is still more than the same ad on a newspaper’s website. By finding the correlating advertising opportunity online, buyers are saving themselves precious advertising revenue and sometimes even finding a larger demographic to pitch to.

Social media, on the other hand, is seeing a lot of success for those companies that can manage to figure out the best way to put it to work. Beauty and personal care products are some of the forerunners in this contest, offering a whole range of online and social media resources devoted to allowing their buyers to interact with one another, get answers to their questions from experts, and talk to the sellers of their favorite products. All the while, the company reaps benefits from this seemingly free service, since the goodwill their users feel toward them makes them more inclined to buy their products.

So…what does all this mean for companies who want to do the smart thing with their ad budgets? They need to learn “nontraditional” advertising formats, and fast – because nontraditional is rapidly becoming the norm, and “traditional” may very well be becoming code for “obsolete.”

-Peter Koeppel

Facebook is hot, hot, hot

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ADOTAS - What’s scorching on the digital front? Mediaweek thinks Facebook is so hot that it’s sizzling — the social media mecca pushed its way to the stop slot of the “Digital Hot List 2009″ after coming in second the year before. The magazine noted that the site has supplanted porn as the Internet’s no. 1 activity — you can hear jaws drop across the nation. Hulu moved up two spots to take the second slot and Twitter joined the list at no. 3. Though fourth hottest is nothing to snicker at, Google has cooled off after taking first place last year.

-Gavin Dunaway

Verizon asks consumers not to text and drive in new campaign

Verizon Wireless has rolled out an advertising effort called “Don’t Text and Drive,” encouraging people who get into a vehicle’s driver seat to keep their hands on the wheel.

The campaign began this past week with a mix of ads, including television, radio, print, online, billboards and non-traditional media, designed to reach drivers.

“The strategy behind the campaign is to change the behavior of those who text and drive and reinforce the behaviors of those who don’t,” said Jeffrey Nelsen, spokesman at Verizon Wireless, Basking Ridge, NJ. This is obviously an issue, as driving and texting is dangerous and our campaign is a responsible corporate response to how people use our products and offers”

The TV spots claim that even though Verizon Wireless is all for texting, the carrier is more focused on the safety of subscribers. The spots ask consumers to think twice before they text and drive.

Verizon Wireless has a long history of leadership on the issue of driving while using wireless services.

When Verizon formed Verizon Wireless in 2000, it broke from the rest of the wireless industry by supporting legislation that required people who talked while driving to use hands-free devices.

More recently, as texting has become mainstream, the wireless carrier supports bans on texting while driving and prohibits Verizon Wireless employees from texting while on the job or in a company vehicle.

-Giselle Tsirulnik

Wireless industry strong even in struggling economy

EDITOR'S NOTE: I always try to provide information in this blog that helps Brandel's Publishers provide a solid case for mobile marketing.

Utilize the 300+ articles in this blog by searching for 'marketing' or 'statistics' in the Google search box to the right. Here is another great example of the overall strength and well-being of the mobile industry.

Even during a recession and with their wireline businesses drying up, AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless both posted strong third-quarter results, proof that the wireless industry as a whole is strong.

AT&T added 2 million new subscribers, while Verizon added 1.2 million subscribers, and both carriers posted revenue increases. That growth was fueled in wireless subscribers increasing appetite for high-end smartphones and a related surge in customers’ data usage.

“We’ve been seeing that AT&T and Verizon have been pulling ahead of the rest of the pack in the mobile carrier space in the U.S.,” said Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, Newton, MA. “While Sprint and T-Mobile USA have not released their third-quarter numbers yet, given AT&T and Verizon’s strong showing in both the revenue and subscriber space, they seem to be pulling even further ahead this quarter.

“Overall these results show that the wireless industry is really strong, even in the face of the down economy, showing that people want to communicate via mobile,” she said. “These top-two carriers are targeting people who want a richer data experience on their device, and they are willing to sign a two-year contract to get a subsidized high-end device.

“Sure, they use their mobile devices for texting and talking, but they’re hooked on the Internet, applications and social networking, so AT&T and Verizon are looking to lock-in these high-value consumers who use a lot of data and want an exciting device.”

“We saw AT&T lead this charge with the iPhone and the App Store, and we continue to see strong growth in that area,” she said. “Verizon announced its partnership with Google, which is its next big move in this area.

For both AT&T and Verizon Wireless, integrated devices—a.k.a. smartphones—are paramount to their overall strategy, because they are going after the most lucrative wireless consumer base.

Verizon Wireless is the largest wireless company in the U.S. in terms of total customers and revenues. AT&T is No. 2, followed by Sprint and T-Mobile USA.

During the third quarter, Verizon Wireless customers sent or received more than 153 billion text messages. Customers also sent more than 2.8 billion picture/video messages and completed close to 38 million music and video downloads.

Wireless text messages on the AT&T network exceeded 120 billion, nearly double the total for the year-earlier quarter.


While AT&T and Verizon Wireless have seen competition at the lower end of the market, with bundling of text-messaging and voice into unlimited packages, in the third quarter they solidified their places as the top-two carriers in the U.S.

“They have shown that the economy has not dampened people’s interest in mobile, and in fact the wireless industry has grown and held its own.”

-Dan Butcher

iPhone Key in Mom's Shopping Decisions

Mobile marketers are focusing more and more on what's become known as the iPhone Mom, and for good reason. A new report from Greystripe highlights that 79% of these iPhone moms rely on their devices for shopping-related tasks, such as locating stores, keeping track of shopping lists, comparision shopping, and downloading coupons.

Greystripe is out to convince everyone from marketers to moms that the iPhone Mom is here to stay. The new study follows up an earlier report in August, when Greystripe claimed that iPhone moms made up 29.5% of all iPhone users. Meanwhile, a study from Scarborough Research in September reported that working moms spend 21% more than the average cell phone user on their cell phone bills.

Moms are often the key decision makers in a household (40% are, reports this study), which makes this group a key target for mobile marketers. Mothers, once a slow-to-adapt segment, are unusually quickly taking to the iPhone. Of course, not all moms are jumping on the smartphone bandwagon, but those that are often power the household spending decisions.

Some other interesting findings

- 96% of iPhone moms are involved in their household purchasing decisions, with 40% being the sole decision maker

- 71% of iPhone Moms have household incomes between $32k and $165k

- 86% of iPhone Moms are between 25 and 54

- 80% of iPhone Moms have attended at least some college, with 4% more receiving a graduate degree than the rest of the iPhone user base

- 59% of iPhone moms let their kids use their phone

- 94% of iPhone moms download games and entertainment apps

- Mobile Marketing Watch

Pizza Hut iPhone app generates $1M in sales

The Pizza Hut mobile commerce app is driving sales in a major way. After being live in the App Store for three months, the Pizza Hut application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch has surpassed $1 million in sales.

As the featured icon in the iTunes Lifestyle Category, the application is an option for customers wanting to order their pizza, pasta and wings from Pizza Hut while on the go. Pizza Hut claims that the application is approaching one million downloads.

“We are extremely excited here about the explosive growth we’ve seen with our iPhone app since its launch 3 months ago—$1 million in sales is pretty substantial for an iPhone app,” said Bernard Acoca, senior director of digital marketing at Pizza Hut, Dallas, TX. “Overall we’re tremendously excited with the momentum the app has and the attention it’s received—it is featured in Apple’s recent television commercial campaign, which is any app developer’s dream scenario.

“From an income standpoint iPhone customers tend to be more affluent, and they’re in the tech-savvy 18-34-year-old demographic skewing slightly male that we tend to go after online,” he said. “We always saw a steady level of growth with our mobile business via our WAP site, but to be candid it wasn’t the explosive level of growth we’ve seen with the iPhone app.

“IPhone applications capture consumers’ imagination in a way that WAP sites simply can’t do, so the decision to expand to the iPhone was as good one for us.”

Pizza Hut is an American restaurant chain and international franchise that operates more than 10,000 restaurants in more than 90 countries.

The pizza giant is a subsidiary of Yum Brands Inc., the world's largest restaurant company, with approximately 34,000 restaurants, delivery-carry out units and kiosks in 100 countries.

Pizza Hut claims that it was the first national pizza chain to introduce an application for iPhone and iPod touch with ordering functionality.

The goal of launching the iPhone application was to provide a convenient way for Pizza Hut customers to order from its franchisee locations.

The application uses iPhone and iPod touch features such as the multi-touch user interface and accelerometer with the goal of making the ordering process for each individual menu item a customized experience.

When ordering pizzas, users virtually build their own pizza by choosing a type of crust in the scroll wheel, "pinching" to select size and dragging-and-dropping toppings onto the pizza, all with visual confirmation.

If an overeager pizza customer adds too many toppings, the pizza explodes and toppings go flying across the screen with an alert to make their pizza happier with fewer toppings.

Each time a user orders using the application they get 20 percent off their entire order.

The application also provides Pizza Hut with the opportunity to promote specific products and new offerings.

Pizza Hut also has given consumers a way to pass the time as they wait for their order with a game called Pizza Hut Racer, in which users are challenged to deliver a pizza quickly while avoiding obstacles in the road.

“In terms of Pizza Hut’s mobile business, over the next three to five years, more and more online transactions are going to migrate to smartphone usage,” Mr. Acoca said. “We always want to be where are customers are going, so we’re going to make the necessary investment to help customers order in ways they are comfortable.”

Rather than consumers simply migrating from calling in or visiting the PC Web site, Pizza Hut believes that the iPhone application is driving sales it may not have closed otherwise.

“We see it as being highly incremental, as much for the reason that people have a genuine need to order pizza and they want to engage with a really cool app that says something about them,” Mr. Acoca said. “The app has show-me factor making people want to engage with it and it also fulfills a functional need of ordering pizza.

“Just speak to any iPhone user, and the passion with which they describe and speak about their phone is incredible,” he said. “If they’ve taken the time to download an app, they perceive it as valuable, because it’s taking up coveted real estate.

“Apple has managed to create not just a functional device, but a tool that reaches an emotional level with consumers that most handset manufacturers haven’t been able to achieve.”

-Dan Butcher

Mobile customers to brands: Text us!

ADOTAS - John Doe is just wasting time over there, scanning the mobile web on his smartphone, waiting for his favorite brand to send him an incredible offer via an SMS.

According to a new survey by HipCricket, a healthy proportion of respondents (37%) said they’d be interested in joining a mobile customer brand loyalty plan, but 83% haven’t had their favorite brands reach out and touch them.

Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they’d gone to retailers’ websites and nearly 30% of that segment went looking for coupons and promotions.

In addition, 34% of respondents received a marketing offer via a text message in the past year, compared to 28% in 2008. The campaigns appear to be stronger as 47% had brand recall from the offer, nearly all of them remembered the specific discount or deal.

-Gavin Dunaway

AdMob bears witness to mobile advertising explosion

ADOTAS - If mobile is the next great frontier of advertising, it’s rapidly being populated according to figures from AdMob, which provides ads for more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications. Just the year before, AdMob boasted less than 5,000publishers.

According to the company’s “Mobile Metrics Report,” AdMob received 10.2 billion ad requests in September 2009, twice as many as the year before and nearly 10 times the number from September 2007. Requests came from 64 countries, compared to just 16 in 2007.

Forty-two percent of requests in the U.S. were made from wifi-capable devices; 18% of actual requests were made via wifi connections, compared to 5% the year before.

This expansion owes a great deal to the proliferation of smartphones. The top 10 mobile devices for requests included five with touchscreens, six with wifi capabilities and six with application stores; in 2008, the iPhone was the only touchscreen device in that group.

Global iPhone and iPod touch traffic increased 19 times from the year before, but devices using Google’s Android operating system also witnessed a boost, accounting for 17% of AdMob’s smartphone traffic in September.

-Gavin Dunaway

Hispanics More Apt To Respond To Mobile

It's no secret that younger consumers respond to mobile marketing much more than older consumers, but I came across an interesting case study that dove into the realm of socioeconomic and race-based demographics in regards to how they respond to mobile marketing.

Continental Airlines recently ran a marketing campaign aimed at the Hispanic-American demographic in which consumers could enter by texting a keyword to a short code or by clicking on a WAP link within an SMS alert from Univision and other various publishers.

The contest let consumers enter to win a trip for two anywhere in the world up to $2,500 worth of plane tickets by submitting a video.

The airline ran ads on TV, on-line banners, search engine ads, out-of-home, radio and mobile both SMS and WAP. After it was all said and done, the company found that their interactive ads (mobile and on-line) were more effective than their off-line ads by a long shot (not surprising) but, most interestingly, the mobile ads were five-to-ten times more effective than on-line advertising.

A ten-times better response for mobile over other forms of marketing isn't that surprising, but mobile getting a ten-times better response over Online ads for the same campaign is pretty impressive- and speaks volumes as to what the best way to reach the Hispanic demographic is.

The case study taught Continental Airlines a thing or two about not only what mobile can do when used properly in a multi-media campaign, but also how to bolster response from certain demographics.

-Mobile Marketing Watch

Scratch-Off Games Hit The Digital World

Call Susan at Brandel - 954-583-9000 - to get your own randomly-generated number mobile system.

I'm usually not impressed with most of the so-called gimmick apps that enter the market, but every now and then one comes along that actually provides a bit of substance.

Such is the case with the new iScratcher mobile app that effectively turns any touch-based mobile device into a scratch-to-win game card. I know, it seems like another useless app that would get used once or twice and then deleted forever once the novelty wares off, but from a mobile marketing viewpoint, the iScratcher app could prove to be somewhat useful.

The concept is simple- advertisers sponsor scratch-off games that display on mobile device screens. Players scratch off a game card by wiping the screen with a finger to reveal sponsor brand images and potential prizes such as cash, products, coupons, promotional codes, lottery results, or content. Using GPS technology, iScratcher provides location-specific game odds, prizes and with another tap of the finger a map with directions to nearby stores where prizes can be instantly redeemed.

It's only available for iPhones and iPod touches presently, but Android and Blackberry versions are on the way. Scratch-off games have always been popular, for one reason or another, and the idea behind iScratcher is to make it so advertisers can make promotions more attractive and available to everyone by offering the same promotion on the most popular technologies in addition toor in place oftraditional cardboard tickets.

I think advertisers will find some unique ways to utilize the iScratcher app, and they'll most likely be successful when adding the location element GPS provides. Only time will tell, but this is one novelty app that might have some traction.

-Mobile Marketing Watch

Local Search Booming On Mobile & Social Platforms

I know what you're thinking, a study saying that local search is growing rapidly on mobile devices sounds like a no-brainer, but hear me out. A new study put out by TMP Directional Marketing aimed at determining the year-over-year growth of local search and the shifts in consumer behavior and media usage. Put simply, the study wanted to point out where local search is coming from and how its being used today as opposed to last year.

The study shows that while the Web in general is still obviously fueling growth in the overall search market, its mobile and social network search in particular that are increasingly becoming the main factors in the equation. The total search market grew to 21.9 billion total US searches in June 2009, a year-on-year increase of 31%.

From a mobile standpoint, the study proved that with 22 million consumers using the mobile Internet through June 2009, the preferred mode to access local business information remains the mobile browser. In fact, 127 percent more users accessed local content via downloaded applications on mobile devices, compared to June 2008.

Furthermore, among the various local content categories searched on mobile platforms, more consumers accessed online directories (42 percent), followed by maps (41 percent), restaurant information (37 percent) and movies (30 percent).

Interestingly, consumers performing local searches via social networking platforms is on the rise as well, with 4 percent of young people doing their searches for local information on social sites like Facebook. Should be interesting to see how much that number grows in the coming years.

Location-aware local searches are becoming increasingly important for consumers of any age, with the study pointing out the fact that nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents in 2009 stated that they expect their search results to reveal businesses within 15 miles of their homes or places of work. This statistic is significantly higher compared to 2008 (59 percent) and 2007 (52 percent), proving that consumers expect more relevance in their business searches.

The search market has always been interesting to follow due to its ever-changing ecosystem and the ever-evolving devices and platforms that are used to perform searches.

Mobile will undoubtedly be a driving factor in the future of search, but social-based search and the location-aspect of search will send huge waves through the market in the very near future.

-Mobile Marketing Watch

Mobile is central to FCC mission

This is an excerpt from a speech made by Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to a convention of CTIA-The Wireless Association - happening right now in San Diego, CA.

...being at the FCC reminds me of my time in business: It's all about mobile.

In my time as an investor and executive I saw mobile go from a futurist fantasy, to a nice-to-have part of a company's gameplan, to a must-have strategic priority. Today every company in America – entertainment, commerce, news, you name it – knows it needs to have a mobile strategy.

That's because all of you are changing the world. You've turned clunky one-trick handsets into sleek and powerful mini-PCs. You've made the Internet mobile, freeing broadband from the desktop and making it possible to imagine a world where the Internet is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

You're making that possible through the billions you've invested, and the billions you plan to invest.

At the FCC, we also recognize that mobile is central to our mission. No sector of the communications industry holds greater potential to enhance America's economic competitiveness, spur job creation, and improve the quality of our lives.

My goals with regard to mobile are the same that define and drive all our work: fostering innovation and investment, promoting competition, empowering and protecting consumers, all in an effort to help ensure the U.S. has a world-leading communications infrastructure for the 21st century.

My specific objectives involve unleashing spectrum for broadband; removing obstacles to 4G deployment, like delays in tower siting; developing fair rules of the road to preserve the openness of the Internet, while recognizing the differences between wired and wireless technologies; and empowering consumers by supporting a vibrant, transparent and competitive mobile marketplace.

That – in a nutshell – is how we will further America's leadership in mobile.